A Contrarian Spin on the Next Big Climate Report

Some Green readers have probably heard by now that a draft of the next big United Nations report on climate change has leaked . The agent of the leak is a rather colorful climate contrarian named Alec Rawls , who essentially claimed , on the basis of a single sentence in the draft, that the entire edifice of climate science is about to collapse. In his interpretation, the group putting the report together, the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change , is about to acknowledge the validity of a longstanding fringe theory: that cosmic rays have a huge influence on the earth’s climate. This claim turns out to be an overstatement, to say the least. But first, what do the leak and the accompanying flurry of reaction on blogs tell us about the United Nations exercise of periodically summarizing climate science? These reports come out roughly every five years. They are unlike an...